


Gift Horse

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Codependency, Consensual Blood Drinking, Gen, Mild Gore, Vampire AU, foggy is having a difficult time, implied Matt/Foggy, matt misplaced his self-preservation instinct
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 19:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8857255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: Foggy has been missing for over a month when Matt hears something outside his apartment.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this adorable art](http://iraya.tumblr.com/post/152508565964) by Iraya, which I then dragged through a garbage fire of sadness, so she [made another. ](http://iraya.tumblr.com/post/153451516539)

A day after, Matt thought he could fix it. That was what Daredevil was _f_ _or._ He searched Hell’s Kitchen, searched half of Manhattan, starting from the last place Foggy was seen.

A week later, Matt thought it wasn’t real—couldn’t be real, nobody just disappeared like that. Not without leaving a trail of blood or credit card charges, not without some kind of _proof_ _._

A month later, Matt sat in the basement of a Lutheran church with the extended Nelson clan, eating ham and making stilted small talk. They weren’t calling it a funeral because there wasn’t a body.

Afterwards, Matt went to Josie’s to make sure he couldn’t think anything at all.

\---

He woke up to the sound of someone in the hall outside his apartment, and for a sweet sleepy moment he thought it might be – but then the weight of it came crashing back down on him, the refrain like a siren, _Foggy is gone, Foggy is gone, Foggy is gone._ He pressed his face back into the pillow. What was the point of even being awake if--

Someone in the hallway.

Some _thing._

Matt listened carefully. It sounded human enough, the way it moved, the way its weight made the floorboards shift. It smelled like the bottom of the Hudson had climbed out of its channel to pay him a personal visit. All around the building were the usual night sounds—about three in the morning, based on the infomercials filtering up from the second floor and the snatches of car radios out on the street—and everything seemed normal except for the thing in the hallway. The thing that seemed human enough, with squishing, shuffling footsteps and shifting clothes, heavy breathing and the soft clicking of pocket-debris.

Except that he couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Not out in the hall, where the thing was moving with a stumbling, unsteady gait. Every one of his neighbors was snug in their beds (or in front of the TV in the case of the insomniac on the second floor) and their hearts were steady, calm.

And the thing in the hallway, shambling towards him, didn’t have one.

Matt quietly slipped off the bed, shed his jacket and tie. The costume was in the coat closet (packed away, what good had it done, what was the point—) and getting it out would be slow, loud, and leave him exposed. But he could wrap a belt around his fist, slip out of the bedroom towards the kitchen, where there was some cover.

No heartbeat, but the thing was breathing, almost panting, and it reached door at the same time Matt reached the kitchen island. He grabbed an empty bottle (there were an awful lot of empty bottles), hefting it by the neck, and the thing pressed heavy hands against the door, fumbled at the knob.

Matt’s breath caught in his throat when heard the sound of keys coming out of a pocket. Keys that scratched at the door, skittering, before finding a home in his lock. The pins clicked into alignment. He’d given a key to two people, Karen and –

The door flew open, and the smell of filthy river water blossomed out into the entryway. Filthy and _cold_ — there was no plume of warmth coming off the body, nothing to mark it _as_ a human body except the joints moving, lungs laboring, the dead space where it absorbed its own echos. Matt paced its stumbling steps from the other side of the wall, ready to strike as soon as it cleared the entryway. Strike with the bottle, hope it didn’t shatter in his grip, follow up with a body blow and—

“...Matt?”

The bottle fell.

The—thing—person—it—in the entryway he (it?) turned, looked, still cold, still heartless. One hand on the edge of the wall, wavering. “Matt, I—”

His knees buckled, and Matt was there to catch him, to ease him down, because, heartbeat or not, he’d recognize that voice from a thousand miles away.

“Foggy.” At this range he could smell something familiar under the funk of mildew and dirty water. He ran his hands up Foggy’s arms—the same suit he’d been wearing when he vanished, now soaked and streaked with filth—and pressed both hands against his face. Ice cold. Damp. No pulse, no blood moving under the skin.

But Matt knew that face, knew the trembling hands that clamped around his wrists, and nothing, _nothing_ could’ve made him let go.

“Matt,” Foggy croaked again, breath coming out room-temperature. He wasn’t trying to push him away, let Matt brush the slimy strings of wet hair out of his eyes.

“Foggy, what the hell?” Matt asked.

He felt Foggy’s eyes squeeze shut as he pressed his head back, against the wall. “I don’t—don’t remember. I—”

Matt let him trail off, too wrapped up in wonder—he should be afraid. He should be asking questions, trying to work out how Foggy was back, how Foggy was here, how Foggy was doing _anything_ with that dull silence in his chest. But for the moment he was too shocked, shocked and greedy, tracing Foggy’s face—tense brow, lax jaw, the sharp edge of a (broken?) tooth—in the way Foggy had only ever let him do once. He was here, he was back, solid and real under Matt’s fingers in spite of everything, he might not have a pulse but he was breathing, he was—

He was hyperventilating, actually, and Matt stupidly realized that was probably a bad thing. Under the dirty water stench, Matt caught a faint scent of blood. “Foggy, talk to me,” he said urgently. “Did you — are you hurt?”

That got a small, hysterical laugh out of him. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t—it’s—” He shrugged off Matt’s hands and pressed the heels of his own palms into his eyes. “It’s really loud out there.”

“What do you mean, loud?” Matt asked. He relocated one hand to Foggy’s knee, as much for his own benefit _(here! Real! Here! Real!)_ as to steady him.

“It’s _loud,”_ Foggy repeated, slurring his words a little, “everything’s loud, and everything smells, and it’s...it’s hot inside, but I thought, I thought you would know, but it’s so hot in here and it’s...everything’s...too much. And it won’t _stop_ _.”_

Foggy thought it was hot, when his skin temperature was maybe fifty degrees, if Matt was generous. Okay. But _too much everything_ _non-stop_ sounded pretty damn familiar, and he could do something about that, or try to. “Tell me five things you can hear,” Matt said, squeezing Foggy’s knee gently.

“Wha…?”

“Or, you don’t have to say them,” Matt quickly corrected. “Don’t have to make sense of them. Just label them. Five things you can hear, five things you can smell, five things you can feel...five things you can see,” he remembered to add.

Just the act of thinking about it helped Foggy’s breathing slow a little, and he dropped his hands from his eyes. “I see...you. That stupid billboard. The table. The chairs. Do the chairs count as two things or one thing twice?”

“Five things you hear,” Matt prompted.

Foggy shut his eyes again. “You. Me. The fridge. Traffic. TV.”

That was—the closest TV was the second-floor insomniac’s. Foggy shouldn’t be able to hear that. “Things you can smell?” Matt asked, transferring his grip to Foggy’s wrist.

“Stank-ass river water.”

“That doesn’t count as five,” Matt prompted after a moment of silence.

“It stinks enough that it _should_ count as five."

Matt fought down a small, relieved smile at the familiar tone. “Five things you feel.”

“Wet. Hot. Your hand. The wall.” Foggy suddenly swallowed, hard. “Hungry.”

They stayed where they were—Foggy slumped against the wall and Matt crouching beside him—and Foggy went through four things, three things, two, one. His breathing evened out, though his hand kept trembling. Matt found himself running the pad of his thumb over Foggy’s wrist, over the point where there should’ve been a jumping pulse, and when Foggy ran out of things to list he decided it was safe to ask. “How much do you remember, Foggy? After you left Marci’s apartment.”

“I--” Foggy hesitated, blinked. “How d’you know I was with Marci?”

There was no kind way to say this. “You’ve been missing for about four weeks.”

Foggy stiffened, and he grabbed Matt’s forearm, so that they were gripping one another. “Shit. _Shit._ _”_

The tremor in Foggy’s voice reminded Matt that he ought to be afraid, probably. “Yeah,” he said, with a little squeeze. _Here! Real!_ “It was...it’s been bad.”

(He wasn’t sure what _it_ he was even referring to.)

After a few minutes, Foggy swallowed hard and started talking slowly, carefully, but his words still slurred around the edges. “I walked Marci to her building. She—I didn’t feel like going up. She offered to call me a cab, but it’s not like it’s that far of a walk and I hadn’t had that much to drink.”

“So you started walking home.”

“I started walking.” Foggy was silent for a long time, and his grip on Matt’s arm incrementally tightened. “I don’t remember what happened next.”

Even without a heartbeat to go by, that sounded like a lie, or at least a half-truth. Matt let it slide. “What’s the next thing you do remember?”

“Crawling out of the river, about half an hour ago.” Foggy raked his free hand through his filthy hair. “I don’t know how I ended up in the river in the first place, but I—I pulled myself out, and started to head home. But...something’s wrong, Matt. Something’s all screwed up, and I think it’s me, and I didn’t know what to do, so...”

“So you came here.” He wasn’t sure if he should be touched that, in spite of everything, Foggy came here when he needed someone—or insulted that he was the first person Foggy thought of in connection to _all screwed up._

(Oh, who was he kidding. Foggy was here and Matt hadn’t been able to take his hands off him since he stumbled in the door. _Screwed up_ wasn't an insult, it was an objective description.)

“Sorry,” Foggy said after a short silence. “For, uh, for collapsing in your living room.”

“Better than collapsing in the street,” Matt pointed out.

There was another awkward pause.

“You should probably shut the door,” Foggy said.

It took more willpower than Matt was willing to admit to step away. He retrieved the keys Foggy had left hanging in the lock, shut the door and bolted it. Then he took a detour into the bedroom to find some clean clothes and a towel. (It was more difficult than he expected. He'd let some things...slip.)

While he searched, he heard Foggy clamber unsteadily into one of the kitchen chairs, followed by the occasional barely-vocalized recitation of _five things you can see, five things you can hear._ Matt brought the clothes out into the living room and set them on the table, one hand automatically seeking Foggy’s shoulder again. “Here. If you wanna get cleaned up.”

Foggy reached out, not for the clothes, but for Matt’s hand holding them. “Thanks,” he said, without actually moving.

So Matt hooked the other chair with his foot and sat, knees bumping up against Foggy’s thigh, rubbing vague circles on Foggy’s back. It was the least he could do, and even if it didn’t really help—well, it helped _him,_ and Foggy didn’t seem to mind. After a while, he even began to lean in towards Matt's touch. "You're warm," he said, sounding almost drowsy.

"You should change, get dry," Matt said, rather than pointing out that it was Foggy who was cold.

"You're warm and also weirdly calm about all this," Foggy insisted.

Matt shrugged. "Just trying not to look a gift horse in the mouth."

Foggy was—probably staring at him; without the subtle map of heat under his face it was hard to tell. His breathing, at least, had slowed—almost too slow now, except when he was speaking. "That's not a dig at my looks, is it?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm an expert on looks over here."

Foggy was definitely leaning in towards him, and he switched which hand was on Matt's so he could turn towards him. "'Cause I'm not feeling particularly gift-like right now."

"How are you feeling?"

Foggy shrugged a little. "Scared. A little loopy. Hungry."

That word again. "You want something to eat?"

"I don't know." Foggy was close enough that his cool breath raised goosebumps on Matt's neck. "I think...I don't know."

"Just tell me what you need," Matt said. "Let me help."

Foggy leaned closer, and his free hand found a spot on Matt's hip. For a moment, he thought Foggy was going to kiss him, and he—actually, he was really okay with that.

But the trajectory of his mouth went lower, angled, and his lips curled back—

It hurt, at first. It hurt like a son of a bitch, but no more than Matt could take. (And with the proper motivation Matt could take a lot.) The euphoric rush that followed, though—that was unexpected, more than just endorphins and blood loss, and it left him clinging to Foggy, dizzy and a little weak. Clinging to Foggy with one arm because Foggy was clinging to him, mouth pressed into his neck and _sucking—_

 _Okay,_ Matt thought blurrily, feeling some warmth finally spread under Foggy's skin. Apparently he was okay with a lot of things where Foggy was concerned.

Maybe he said it out loud; maybe it didn't matter. A moment later Foggy coughed, choked, and recoiled, so suddenly that Matt nearly slid out of his chair. "Fuck," Foggy blurted, "fuck, Jesus, _fuck—"_

Matt's head was spinning, and groped for the towel he's brought out a minute ago. Blood ran down his neck and soaked into his shirt—not nearly as much as he expected, though. "It's okay," he definitely said out loud.

"The _fuck,"_ Foggy said. He tried to back away, got tangled up in his chair, escaped and backed towards the stairs.

Matt's entire world narrowed down Foggy and leaving and _no._ "Don't go," he said, but standing up was a bad idea, and he was lucky his ass landed back in the chair. "Please, Foggy, don't leave—"

Foggy didn't listen; but at least he bolted for the bathroom, not the roof.

Matt stayed where he was until the dizziness passed; he took the time to fill the kitchen sink with cold water, and left the towel and his shirt to soak. There was a pair of short, ragged lacerations just under his jaw, but he'd had worse off a mugger as Daredevil and anyway, they'd already clotted. Pain seeped back in as the euphoria faded, but he knew how to deal with pain.

He didn't necessarily know how to deal with a vampire in his bathroom, but if this was the worst part of it...maybe they could figure something out. Maybe there were...alternatives, or something. Foggy was still _Foggy,_ not some kind of monster. He might have come back different, but he hadn't really changed.

(God, though He worked in mysterious ways, couldn't possibly be that cruel.)

Matt put a band-aid over his neck, out of principle, and then knocked on the bathroom door. He could just sense Foggy hunched on the toilet, on the edge of hyperventilating again, but at least he was warm now. Though that only amplified the awful smell of his clothes, mingled with the smell of fresh blood—in the small space it would be overwhelming.

"I'm all right," Matt announced, leaving the door closed.

Foggy made a harsh sound somewhere in the vicinity of a giggle. "That makes one of us."

"It's not your fault."

"Matt," Foggy said breathlessly. "Buddy. I just _drank you blood._ I'm not sure you're supposed to be comforting me."

"You didn't do any lasting damage."

"That we know of!" There was a hysterical edge to Foggy's voice now, but Matt noticed he was no longer slurring his words. "Or are you also a secret vampire expert in your off hours?"

"I'm just as clueless as you are," Matt admitted. "But the injury's not that bad, you didn't...I'm pretty sure I've donated more blood than that, and...and you stopped. You _can_ stop."

"I shouldn't have _started,_ Matt."

"Nobody's perfect."

Foggy groaned, and the toilet clinked as he shifted his weight. "Stop talking. Come back when you find your self-preservation instinct. And maybe a wooden stake."

Matt's stomach dropped. "Is...is that what you want?"

Foggy was still and silent for a long time, except for his breathing, while Matt fought down the first real fear he'd felt all night. If Foggy said yes—maybe Matt was okay with a lot of things, but he couldn't—

"No," Foggy said, though he didn't sound enthusiastic about it. "But, Jesus, Matt, what if I hadn't stopped?"

"You did, though," Matt said. "And next time we can—"

"The hell do you mean 'next time?'"

"You tell me," Matt said. "Is there gonna be a next time?"

In a small, defeated voice, Foggy said, "Yes."

"Then we're in it together," Matt said firmly. "This is me, offering to help. Giving consent. Whatever you want to call it."

"Because you're fine with me _biting you."_

Matt leaned against the frame of the door. "Because I lost you, and then I got you back. That doesn't usually happen to me."

Foggy sighed, and then, alarmingly, stopped breathing altogether for several minutes. When he started again, it was to say, "I think I'm gonna take that shower now."

It felt like a diversion, not a resolution, but that was probably the best they were gonna do. "Lemme find you a clean towel."


End file.
